Cross-posted from The Wichita Eagle.

By Derrick Sontag and Phil Kerpen

The surprise revenue source to pay for much of the Obama budget is something known deceptively as "climate revenues," also known as "cap-and-trade." What cap-and-trade really means is tax and spend -- at an unprecedented level and with sweeping consequences throughout the economy, both nationally and in Kansas. It's the worst kind of tax hike -- a hidden tax hike, hidden behind a complex regulatory scheme that only adds to the cost.

The size of the tax is a mystery -- companies know they have to pay a tax, but nobody knows what the tax rate is because companies will be forced to bid at auction for the government to allow it to use fossil fuels. The Obama budget initially slated the cap-and-trade tax to generate about $646 billion in revenue to the federal government over eight years. More recently, however, the deputy director for the White House National Economic Council, Jason Furman, reported that the tax scheme actually would raise two to three times that much, running upward of $1.3 trillion to $1.9 trillion. The truth is that nobody knows how much this will cost, and that's part of the problem.

We do know the impact on our economy in Kansas would be staggering. An analysis conducted by the highly respected forecasting firm SAIC and commissioned by the American Council for Capital Formation projected the economic impact of last year's version of cap-and-trade for Kansas. It found that by 2020, with the bill in effect only eight years, we would have 11,000 to 16,000 fewer jobs, $900 to $3,000 less annual disposable income per household, an annual hit to the Kansas economy of between $1.31 billion and $1.82 billion, and much higher energy prices -- 21 to 67 percent higher for gasoline and 31 to 39 percent higher for electricity. The study also found that lower-income families -- the people least able to absorb higher energy costs -- would be the hardest hit.

Those numbers reflect last year's Lieberman-Warner plan. We don't have numbers yet on Obama's new proposal, but it is more extreme and would be even more expensive.

These astonishing economic costs are not an unfortunate side effect of the bill -- they are its intended purpose. Barack Obama himself explained that passing costs on to consumers is an important part of his plan when he told the San Francisco Chronicle last year: "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.... Whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

What makes these costs even worse is that they don't buy us anything of value on the environmental side. Cap-and-trade already is failing to reduce emissions in Europe. And even if emissions targets are met, climate models show that the reductions would have no discernible effect on global average temperature. The National Center for Atmospheric Research found that the Kyoto Protocol would reduce global average temperature 0.07 degrees Celsius in 50 years and 0.15 degrees Celsius in 100 years.

Feel-good symbolism is not worth trillions of dollars in higher energy taxes. Climate change can only be effectively addressed with the luxury of wealth that a free market provides. That's why it would be such a mistake to impose a cap-and-trade, tax-and-spend scheme that would only undermine our prosperity.

This ultimately will be decided in the U.S. Senate. We can only hope that Kansas Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts remain steadfast opponents of cap-and-trade and successfully make the case against it to their colleagues. The health of our state and national economies may depend on it.

Derrick Sontag is Kansas state director for Americans for Prosperity. Phil Kerpen is AFP's national director of policy.